SideBySide in the news.

Following presentation at the UIST 2011 conference, SideBySide project was featured in a broad range of on-line media including Wired, New Scientist, Engadget, Gizmodo, Technology Review and many others.

Design-related on-line resources such as Creative Applications and PAGE magazine in Germany, also run stories about the project.

Internationally Monogocoro in Japan and Membrana in Russia wrote about SideBySide as well as our own local Pittsburgh news site Pop-city Media posted a lovely article about our work.

SideBySide wins top awards at UIST’11.

We presented a paper on SideBySide project at the ACM UIST 2011 conference in Santa-Barbara and it won both Best Paper and Best Demo awards!

The paper can be accessed here.

SideBySide Project.

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SideBySide is a novel interactive system that allows multiple people to play and work together using handheld projectors at anytime and anyplace. SideBySide continues our  investigation of  mobile projectors as a new interactive medium that we started with MotionBeam project.

The use of SideBySide  is immediate and simple: users project onto a surface and their projection becomes aware and responsive to other projections nearby. Interaction can range from projector-based games, such as boxing with projected characters, to everyday tasks such as exchanging contact information by “dragging and dropping” onto another user’s projection.

Importantly, SideBySide does not require any fixed sensing in the environment and can be used anywhere: at home, at the office, or even inside the car during long road trips. The system consists of a hybrid mobile projector that outputs both visible and invisible projections at the same time. The invisible projection contains tracking data that can be recognized by the device camera, allowing accurate location tracking of multiple projections and lightweight communication between devices.

SideBySide was developed by Karl Willis, myself, Scott Hudson and Mo Mahler ad Disney Research, Pittsburgh. See Disney Research and my personal web sites for more information.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on Surround Haptics.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, one of the two major Pittsburgh news papers, published a long interview with me and Ali Israr about haptic technology,  Surround Haptics project and our exhibition that we presented at SIGGRAPH 2011.

A full text of the article is here.

Media on Surround Haptics exhibition.

We got a lot of interest from visitors and great feedback from media on our SIGGRAPH demonstration of Surround Haptics project. Just before the SIGGRAPH a New Scientist TV published our a concept demo video and then  CMU press-release was published before the conference.

At the conference a few web publications wrote about us, including Fast Company magazine blog, gaming site Kotaku, MSNBC, TechNewsDaily, Orlando Sentinel and highly respected technology zines such as Engadget and Register to name a few. Internationally Jerusalem Post, Times of India and La Repubblica in Italy wrote about Surround Haptics SIGGRAPH exhibition. All together it was a very busy week in Vancouver!

Radio interviews on Surround Haptics.

Several national and local radio stations talked to me about Surround Hapics project that we presented at the Siggraph 2011 Emerging Technology exhibition.

Voice of America “Science World” with Rick Pantaleo ran a substantial interview about our technology. I also talked briefly with Marketplace Tech Report from American Public Media and, finally, one of the oldest radio stations in Pittsburgh KQV (stands for “Kings of Quaker Valley”) asked few questions about Surround Haptics. Links to interviews are below:

• Voice of America >>
• Market Place Tech Report / American Public Media (after 3 min mark) >>
• KQV >>

Surround Haptics at SIGGRAPH 2011.

Surround Haptics project was accepted for SIGGRAPH 2011 Emerging Technologies exhibition in Vancouver, August 7 to 11 2011. The title of our SIGGRAPH exhibition is “Surround Haptics: Sending Shivers Down Your Spine” [PDF].

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We use Surround Haptics technology to create an immersive, videotactile gaming environments that delivers detailed tactile sensations tightly synchronized with in-game events. A high-intensity driving game “Split/Second” was enhanced with tactile sensations for collisions, road imperfections, tire traction, acceleration and braking, car damage, etc. BlackRock Studio, the developer of the game and one of the Disney in-house game studios, collaborated with us on this project.

We designed a modular tactile platform that consists of a custom plywood chair, specifically designed for tactile feedback applications,  softpads with an embedded tactile grid, and a wireless controller implementing Surround Haptifcs algorithm. A tactile chair was designed and produced by Prof. Mark Baskinger, Jason May, Natalia Oblonsky and Luke Martin, all from School of Design, CMU.

Talking at CIID, Copenhagen.

I stopped in Copenhagen on my way back to the US and gave a talk at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) on invitation from David Gauthier who is currently a faculty there and Amanda Parkes, who was teaching a summer course there.

CIID was great and very focused interaction design school, I was impressed by students and overall set up there. Students seemed to be impressed by TeslaTouch. And Copenhagen was a lot of  fun.

TeslaTouch wins Best Demo Award!

TeslaTouch wins Best Demo Award and €1000 cash prize at World Haptics 2011!

With 43 haptic demonstrations presented at the  conference the competition was very strong. Therefore, receiving this recognition for TeslaTouch project is an endorsement and a seal of approval of international haptics community.

The cash prize was sponsored by Moog Corporation.

Presenting at World Haptics 2011, Istanbul.

I and Ali Israr went to Instanbul to participate in World Haptics Conference  (WHC 2011), a major venue for all things haptics. We had several things to present there.

First, I gave an invited talk “Tactile touch panels: Why it is hard and what is in the future?” (PDF) at one of the conference  workshops. I talked about lessons I learned from developing tactile feedback for Sony RM-NX7000 universal remote controller – first consumer electronics product with tactile feedback on touch screen.

Ali Israr presented our joint paper “Control Space of Apparent Haptic Motion” (PDF). Talks at WHC 2011 were very competitive with acceptance rate of 16.5% from the total number of submissions.

Finally, we demonstrated TeslaTouch project in the demo session as shown on a photo above.

Istanbul was great location for the conference. It is a beautiful city with a lot of history, everything was well organized and it was the very first conference that I attended where we had a belly dancer at the conference dinner.